Leadership
Vice President Feedstocks and Director of Cell Wall Biosynthesis
Henrik Vibe Scheller
Henrik Vibe Scheller's research for JBEI focuses on the identification of glycosyltransferases and other enzymes involved in cell wall biosynthesis and determining their biochemical function. The obtained knowledge of the enzymes will be used to generate modified plants that are potentially more suitable for biofuel production.
Pamela Ronald is a professor of plant pathology and Chair of the Plant Genomics Program at UC Davis. She is a leading investigator into fundamental biological processes of grasses such as rice and switchgrass, using the tools of genomics, proteomics and informatics.
Dominique received his PhD in 2005 from Hohenheim University (Germany) and worked on Molecular identification and characterization of ammonium transporters using Arabidopsis thaliana as the model specie at the Plant Nutrition Institute. From 2005 to 2007, he did his Postdoc at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University (CA, USA) and worked on characterization of structural regulation of the trimeric AMT1 ammonium transporter family. Since 2008, he is the Director of the Cell Wall Engineering group at JBEI (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, CA, USA). His current goal is to optimize plant development and biomass characteristics for sustainable energycrop and bioenergy productions. He is currently developing synthetic biology tools for plant engineering to reduce cell wall recalcitrance and to redesign its biosynthesis to increase sugar content in selected plant tissues. He is prioritizing versatile technologies that are applicable for a large variety of plant species and suitable for various purposes such as the cost-effectiveness lignocellulosic-biofuels, pulping and forage. He is also building new biosynthetic pathways in specific plant-tissues such as lignifying cells to produce novel lignin monomers that get incorporated into the lignin structure to reduce its recalcitrance and to potentially valorize its commercial value for down-stream applications. He is redesigning cell wall biosynthetic pathways and regulatory networks to improve cell wall accumulation and reduce lignin deposition. Finally, he is using yeast complementation approaches to screen for plant proteins involved in monolignol export or other aromatics derived from the phenylpropanoid pathway.
Joshua spent the past 5 years (2003 to 2008) at The University of Western Australia as an Independent Research Fellow where he characterized plant organelle proteomes using biochemical and bioinformatics techniques. His research program at JBEI involves the utilization and integration of transcript, proteome, metabolome analysis methods and state of the art imaging and spectroscopy to form a detailed characterization of components involved in cell wall formation, development and maintenance.
Miguel is an Assistant Project Scientist in the department of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis and works full-time at JBEI. He is responsible for the management of the Grass Genetics research program in Emeryville, and serves as liaison between the Davis and Emeryville groups in the directorate as well as ensuring efficient collaboration with other groups within the division and JBEI. His research involves advancing the understanding of basic grass cell wall biology and he currently leads the rice forward genetic screen efforts and part of the grass-diverged glycosyl transferase functional characterization.
